As various contents are diversified, and high-volume contents, such as high-definition (HD) contents, ultra-high-definition (UHD) contents, proliferate, data congestion increases. Under such circumstance, contents transmitted from a sensor (e.g., a Host A) are not normally transferred to a receiver (e.g., a Host B), and some of the contents are lost on the route.
Generally, since data is transmitted in packet units, content loss occurs in packet units. A packet includes one block of transmitted data (e.g., payload), address information (e.g., the sender's address and destination address) and management information (e.g., header). Accordingly, in case packet loss occurs over the network, the receiver cannot receive lost packets and cannot be thus aware of data and management information in the lost packets. This causes user inconvenience in various types, such as degraded audio quality, deterioration of video quality or image distortion, subtitle missing, or file loss. Thus, in order to restore data loss caused on a network, application layer forward error correction (AL-FEC) and method for configuring and transmitting/receiving FEC packets for the same are needed.